


Press Restart

by choomchoom



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Bittersweet Ending, Funerals, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Mnemosurgery, Post-Transformers: Lost Light 25, fixit fic, there's (finger guns) more to LL25 Rewind than meets the eye
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-13 05:45:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18462698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choomchoom/pseuds/choomchoom
Summary: "He just asked Chromedome about something called Rung."//CDRW-centric fixit to make the end of Lost Light land just a little bit softer.





	1. Chapter 1

“Ring. Rang. Wrong. Run.”

“Be patient with yourself, sweetspark, you’ll get there.” Chromedome had Rewind gently secured in his palm. He idly stroked Rewind’s chassis with one finger as he struggled to find the words.

“Rung _. Rungrungrungrungrungrungrung_ -”

“Shh.” The transport back from Rivet’s Field was far from crowded, but heads were still turning their way at the commotion. “Rung, yeah. Rung.”

Rewind didn’t seem to settle at the recognition. “Rung should be here.”

“Who’s Rung? Is that a person?” Asking questions of Rewind when he got like this didn’t tend to be useful, but Chromedome had nothing else to latch onto.

“Ring. Rang. Wrong.”

“Is he okay?” Tailgate’s voice was anxious as he looked over at Chromedome, who looked up from where he’d been staring helplessly down at Rewind.

“He’s agitated,” Chromedome replied. “It’s probably the funeral, and seeing the whole crew again. It’s a lot of memories to have resurface at once.”

“Don’t forget me!” Rewind said the phrase with triumph, like he’d solved some internal puzzle.

“No one’s forgetting you, sweetspark. Or Ratchet, if that’s who you’re worried about.” Rewind sometimes struggled with personal pronouns these days.

“Don’t forget me _Rung_.”

“What’s he talking about?”

“Could be anything. He gets the wires crossed, sometimes. Thinks two memories are connected that really aren’t.” For all Chromedome knew, Rung could be some mythological figure from another culture, and some innocuous detail from the proceedings today had made Rewind think that the story was true.

“Rung.” Then, “Tailgate?”

“Yeah, buddy. I’m here.”

“How are you?”

“I’m doing great! Cyclonus and I live in Tetrahex, and apparently Whirl’s going to move in with us soon. Remember when I used to call him Nutjob?”

Chromedome felt Rewind’s laugh in the sensitive receptors of his hand. “He earned it.” Chromedome was just beginning to settle, happy that Rewind was doing well enough to talk to his old friend, when he felt Rewind flinch. “Don’t forget me!”

Chromedome tried to convey an apology to Tailgate through his faceplate. Tailgate didn’t seem scared – convinced that he had done something wrong – like he would have been in the old days. Now he just seemed sad.

Chromedome slipped Rewind into the port at the back of his neck.

Usually, he felt Rewind relax when he did that. Chromedome had worked hard to turn the state of his mind into something soothing for Rewind, as soon as he’d found out that it might help. Rewind tended to be a bit more lucid when they were connected like that – the doctors said that Chromedome steadied him somehow, helped him separate genuine thoughts from his processor from the corrupted ones that bounced up to his processor from his archive.

Today, though, Rewind’s thoughts fizzed out from him, forcing Chromedome to vent deeply a few times to keep the combination of Rewind’s influence and worry about Rewind from setting his own thoughts spiraling. He tried to keep his mind stable, secure, welcoming. One of them had to be solid right now.

Even in there, where Rewind could usually communicate in full sentences, he bombarded Chromedome with the same few thoughts. _Rung. Don’t forget me._ And something that wasn’t possible to express in words, something that Chromedome could only understand because they could communicate like this: a screaming sense of emptiness, of profound loss. Grief? No, Chromedome knew grief. This was different. This was worse.   

Chromedome sent soothing thoughts, doing his best to surround Rewind with love and comfort. He tried to set the worry aside, to focus on later. Now, he could help, and that was his priority.

A part of him had to wonder, though, if this was _it_. The doctors they’d seen had said that eventually Rewind’s processor would no longer be able to differentiate between the corrupted and intact data in his archive, and the corruption would turn Rewind’s mind into a slagheap of meaningless code. They’d assured Chromedome that that day was far off, though, they always had. Maybe the funeral had been a bad idea. Maybe it was too stressful for Rewind, and Chromedome should have _known better—_

_[Domey? It’s okay. I’m okay.]_ Rewind’s voice washed through Chromedome’s mind as the tempest of Rewind’s thoughts finally quieted. Chromedome moved his awareness closer and found that the storm wasn’t gone – just muted. Under control. Holding it down was a burning determination to _do something about it_.

_[I’m glad. I’m so glad,]_ Chromedome thought back. He pushed all the loving, comforting thoughts he could summon towards Rewind, this time just because he wanted to send them.

_[It’s Rung. Remember that for me?]_ Rewind asked, an undercurrent of anxiety in his tone.

_[Of course,]_ Chromedome said, not entirely sure what Rewind was asking of him. _[Rung.]_

_[We…really need to talk about this, but I think I scared Tailgate. Take me out?]_

_[Of course.]_ Chromedome had been so focused on Rewind that he’d turned off the feed from his optics and let the reality of this moment in the shuttle fade away entirely. He brought his own awareness back to the outside world slowly, and then brought Rewind back out. Tailgate, as expected, was staring anxiously at the two of them.

“Sorry about that,” Rewind said. “Funerals are hard. You know.”

“I know,” Tailgate said. His smile was only a little wobbly.  

“Tell me about Tetrahex!” Rewind said, and for a while, they pretended everything was fine.

-

Their quarters these days were on the fringe of Adaptica, the capital and most populated city on New Cybertron. The neighborhood was quiet, and back in the day they had picked it for the location between the bustle of the city and the long stretches of quiet roads past it. They’d moved here originally because it was the ideal location for Chromedome’s work – Adaptica had the largest newcomer and refugee population of any of the cities. It had retained the infrastructure to support newcomers after the citizens of New Cybertron that had taken shelter there during the Functionist era had returned to their homes. Rewind hadn’t seemed to mind one way or the other – he could continue his work from anywhere, after he’d finally finished scanning the Census Center archives.

“I have to go back to the Census Center,” Rewind said as soon as Chromedome closed the door behind them.

 “No.”

“What?”

“What if it makes it worse?” Chromedome couldn’t stop the fear from leaking into his voice. “What if we get there, and you start searching again, and it just makes it worse?”

Rewind was silent for a minute, and the silence stretched between them until Chromedome forced himself to speak again.

“You didn’t just scare Tailgate today. You scared _me_. I know you’re sick, that’s not your fault. I’m responsible for my own feelings. But I can’t…I can’t let you hurt yourself.” Chromedome stopped in his tracks as the truth and gravity of the statement really dawned on him. That was what he was afraid of, most of all, for all this time. That Rewind would destroy himself over his burning need to uncover some secret he insisted was out there. That he _had_ , and now it just had to finish happening.

Was this how Rewind had once felt about _him_?

“You can’t keep me from this. You know how important it is to me.”

“I know.” Chromedome stroked his thumb across Rewind’s chassis as he thought about what to say next. “I won’t keep you from it, if it’s what you really want. But…please think about it. Think about what you’re asking of me – to have to bring you somewhere that could hurt you.”

“I don’t have a choice.” Rewind’s voice controlled, determined. “I have to do this.”

“There’s always a choice.” They both knew how long it had taken for Chromedome to learn that.

“Then I _choose_ to do this. If I don’t check, it’s going to be all I can think about until I lose the ability to think.”

Chromedome knew that Rewind could feel his flinch at the harsh words. Rewind had always known when the right time for them was. “Okay,” he finally said. “We’ll go back to the Census Center.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this story is...possibly kind of rough in ways that I can't think of specific appropriate tags for. Rewind's illness is such that he has trouble organizing and controlling his thoughts, and mnemosurgery in all its Yikes elements is a recurring theme from this chapter onward. Comment with questions, or if there's something you notice I should have tagged (I'm not currently checking tumblr).

The archives hadn’t changed in the years Rewind had been away. The last time he’d been in here had been before he was diagnosed, but he’d already started having symptoms. Reality had seemed to glow around the edges, database access had been itchy and then painful, and he’d started to wake up some mornings unsure who he was. It had gotten a little better since then – he was on a medication that was most commonly used in PTSD sufferers, that damped down the neural connection between memory retrieval and emotional centers. In Rewind’s case, it kept him able to differentiate between his thoughts and the corrupted database that constantly threatened to take over his processor.

He’d first seen these halls before it had all started, fresh off the Lost Light’s (partial) success and eager to tackle the new quest he’d assigned himself. He’d seen these halls through blurry, underfueled optics when he was in the midst of his search, when he’d still been okay and could have, should have, stopped.

And he was back.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Chromedome asked for the fourth time or maybe the fifth as he lingered over a terminal, Rewind in his hand.

“Still yes. I love you.”

“Love you too.” Chromedome slid Rewind into the access port in the terminal.

He hadn’t used a system like this in years. For the first moment he felt like he was doing something wrong – technically, the doctors had told him to stay away from information systems and anything else that would tax his processor more than the corruption was already doing. But this was important. If he was right about this, nothing else mattered. If he was wrong, he’d have taken a risk, and at least he’d know.

He hit search.

There had been somebody named Rung.

 _There had been somebody named Rung_.

Rewind read it all. Rung had had the unlikely serial number of one hundred million, had been imprisoned by the Functionist Council for millions of years for [redacted], had used an improbable application of mass displacement to save the world, once.

And Rewind had forgotten him. How had Rewind forgotten him?

That was a mystery for later, though. He knew in his spark, that it was _Rung_ he’d been searching for, all this time. Now, all there was to do was act on the knowledge.

Rewind spread his arms out from his alt mode and pulled himself out of the terminal. He wasn’t really thinking of anything but the glow of knowing the information he’d been so hungry for, all this time, and how badly he wanted to tell Chromedome. He wanted to wrap his arms around Chromedome and tell him that he’d done it.

And Rewind did. He opened his optics and launched himself at his conjunx, who knelt just in time to catch him in his arms. “I found it, Domey! I found it! It—”

“ _Rewind_.” Chromedome’s voice was too full of emotion to simply be proud of Rewind. The dissonance made Rewind online his optics.

He opened them to the sight of Chromedome’s face, the way he’d once known it.

“You unshrunk,” Chromedome’s smile under his faceplate was audible in his tone and visible in his optics.

Rewind could only squeal in joy and reach in to hug Chromedome again. He’d missed this so much. And all it had taken was the burning desire to hug Chromedome and tell him –

And tell him –

Rewind drew a blank. The corruption resurged with painful force, and Rewind was on one knee, hands clutching his helm, before he processed his body moving.

“Rewind?” Chromedome’s hands were on his sides, holding him steady.

Rewind couldn’t make himself open his optics to look at him. Fighting off the corruption was taking up too much of his concentration. He heard himself making shallow, uneven vents as his processor fought to defend itself.

Chromedome’s hands were trembling on his sides, and his obvious fear gave Rewind the motivation he needed to get his mind back under control.

Rewind’s vents went from shuddering to long and deep, and Chromedome’s hands switched from steadying to stroking, making grounding movements up and down Rewind’s sides.

“It’s gone, Domey,” he choked out, after what must have been minutes. “I don’t remember what I saw.”

“It’s okay. It happens sometimes, you know that.” Chromedome’s hands inched around Rewind’s back and Rewind let himself be pulled closer, resting his head on Chromedome’s shoulder.

“It was there, though. I know it.” Did he, though? He hadn’t known whether or not his memories were real in years.

“Let me look it up for you?” Chromedome trusted too easily. Rewind couldn’t even trust himself.

Rewind tried not to voice the self-deprecation filling his thoughts, though, and Chromedome seemed to take his silence as a yes, running his hand down Rewind’s back one last time before standing up to type at the keyboard attached to the research terminal.

“Rung. He…huh, no birth year on file. Imprisoned by the Functionist Council. He died when we were on _this_ planet the first time.”

“Let me see that.” Rewind climbed up onto the stool at the side of the terminal and looked at the screen. None of the information was familiar, but…this must have been what he’d been so excited about. It was exciting – Rung was real! But Rewind was too wary of his brain to celebrate.

“Ring any bells?” Chromedome asked. Rewind grabbed onto Chromedome’s arm and leaned his head against it as he continued to scrutinize the screen. He shook his head no.

“Weird.” Chromedome stared at the screen some more, and then he moved his optics away, focusing on what looked like the wall on the other side of the archive room. He kept his gaze there for a minute, and then turned it back to the computer. “ _Weird_.”

“What’s weird?” The information was there, plain as day, and Rewind’s traitor brain had thrown a fit at the strain Rewind had put on it by using the Census Center database. Nothing abnormal about any of it.

Chromedome didn’t answer, just did the same thing again, looking at the wall and then back at the screen. Rewind kept his optics on the screen the whole time. Rung. One hundred million. Died fighting the moon.

“We should go,” Chromedome said after a bit. Rewind was surprised that Chromedome had let him stare at the database entry for as long as he had.

“Okay, but back tomorrow, right? I still don’t know _why_ this is the thing I was looking for.”

Chromedome looked at Rewind sadly, and Rewind could tell that he was about to object. “Let’s just go,” he said.

Rewind took Chromedome’s hand in his and hopped down from the stool. His root mode felt strange after so much time stuck in alt, but it wasn’t a bad kind of strange. He liked being able to interact with his environment, to hold Chromedome’s hand and take steps and push the button that would open the door that would lead them out of the library.

Except –

“We have to go back!” They’d found something in that database. Rewind had seen it in his internal memory, and then looked at it on the terminal screen. They’d _found_ it. Rewind just had to remember what it was.

“I know. It’s okay.”

“It’s _not_.”

Chromedome stepped in front of Rewind and knelt so that he was at Rewind’s eye level. “I know. And I’m so sorry that you have to deal with this.” One of Chromedome’s hands was still in Rewind’s hand, and the other was on his shoulder. “But I don’t think that going back in there will help.”

“But if I just – wait, you looked at it! Tell me what it said!”

“I can’t.”

“Domey, please!”

“Rewind, I _physically_ can’t. I don’t remember what it said either.”

That halted every direction Rewind’s thoughts had been going in. “What?”

“Please. Can we get back to the hotel and then talk about this?”

Rewind struggled with his desire to just get back to the computer and _know_ what he needed to know. “Okay,” he said, when his more sensible side, the side that had watched Chromedome learn to make better decisions, won.

Chromedome squeezed Rewind’s shoulder one last time and stood up. The short walk from the Census Center was quiet, Rewind lost in his thoughts, trying to resist the temptation to try to remember what he’d seen on the computer. He wasn’t _sure_ that the near-breakdown he’d experienced when he’d first tried to remember it would happen again, but he certainly wasn’t going to chance bringing it on. He wasn’t sure his processor could handle it.

The click of the door closing behind them was comforting, just like it was when Chromedome closed the door to their home in Adaptica. It made Rewind’s world feel smaller, safer, when it was just the two of them and simple surroundings. The door was closed, the blinds were drawn, and the only problems here were the ones Rewind dealt with every minute.

“I think I know what happened,” Chromedome said, taking a cube of energon from storage and setting it down in front of Rewind with a forceful _clank_. He took a sip of his own and waited for Rewind to follow suit before he continued. “You remember Sunder, right?”

Rewind hunched his shoulders reflexively, which he hoped was enough of a response. What Rewind remembered was a voice out of nightmares, the sight of inside-out Cybertronian bodies, and fear for Chromedome, who’d for some reason been called out of lockdown in the middle of the crisis. When he searched his memory for more details, though, the corruption fought him, and Rewind backed down.

“He could do something that I’d always thought was only theoretical, before meeting him. Non-contact mnemosurgery. Brains are electrical organs, right? So in theory, they could be impacted just as much by electromagnetic intrusions as by electrophysiological ones.”

“Are you saying someone performed mnemosurgery on me?” Rewind could feel himself physically shrinking back from the idea. “I don’t remember –”

“That’s kind of the point,” Chromedome said, then cringed. “Anyway, my hunch is that what happened is the source of both that urge that you started feeling right after the Lost Light and the Delta’s Malady.”

Rewind tried to process the implications of what Chromedome was saying. “Who would have done that?” he asked, fighting to keep his mind on the conversation instead of trying to find the lost memory. “And why?”

“I have no idea.” Chromedome sounded tired. “But I know how to fix it.”

“ _No_.” It had been a long time since Rewind had any cause to tell Chromedome no.

“I’m sorry.” Needles were already extending from the tips of Chromedome’s fingers. Rewind was struck with the realization that he’d kept them in perfect repair.

“Chromedome, _no_. You wouldn’t –”

“What do you think I’m going to do?” Chromedome asked, and then stuck the needles in the back of his own neck.


	3. Chapter 3

This was a bad idea.

Chromedome had sworn off injecting for real, after Dominus. After Ratchet had told him in no uncertain terms that the next injection would more than likely be the end of him. The damage he’d sustained from his years of injecting hadn’t healed in his years of abstinence – foreign memories that his processor hadn’t been designed to hold still took up space, and the strain of a difficult procedure could still overload his taxed neural pathways and, by extension, his spark.

But this wasn’t a difficult procedure. He’d been tempted to use the needles on himself repeatedly, after he’d first _really_ quit, because the stress on his physiology was minimal compared to that of injecting someone else. It was only the knowledge of how hurt Rewind would have been if he discovered Chromedome doing it that had kept him from trying.

Chromedome tried to ignore the rush of excitement at the power he now had over the information in his brain. He could tell where information was stored, and how and when it had gotten there. With a few simple electrical pulses from his fingers, he could rewrite his reality. He could do _anything_.

“Domey? Can you hear me?”

“Yeah, I hear you.” Once the initial rush had faded, this was like any other time. Injecting was taking up most of his concentration, but not so much that he couldn’t observe and respond to the outside world.

“Pull out. It’s too dangerous.”

“I know you have reason not to believe me, but I know what I’m doing. And you know I have reason not to trust anyone else with this.”

“Are you even sure you can do what you’re trying to do?”

“Are you even sure you want me to answer that?” Chromedome asked, instead of the honest answer that would surely have made Rewind more upset. Brains were vast and complexly organized. Trying to find the echo of something that had been edited out of his memories was more a matter of luck than skill.

“You said that it was right after the Lost Light was decommissioned that the mnemosurgery happened, right?”

“Or right before,” he said. Rewind hadn’t started talking about finding some hidden secret until after the ship had landed for the final time, but right before that point they’d had plenty of other things on their minds. Chromedome tried to navigate to memories of that era, but it wasn’t really working. Memory wasn’t linear, it was stored in a complex framework of emotional and contextual associations. And…possibly Chromedome was rusty at this.

“Okay, right before the ship was decommissioned. I remember getting back on the ship after Mederi, meeting back up with Megatron…”

As Rewind talked, Chromedome’s memory files opened naturally at pace with Rewind’s retelling. Until… “Wait!” There was something missing, something that had been edited out, more elegantly than Chromedome had ever seen. The blank space had smooth edges and connections to processing regions that would naturally come up with justifications for the missing information. Chromedome doubted he would even have thought to ask the question if he hadn’t been viewing his memories as a mnemosurgeon. “Where did the matrixes come from?”

“I…I don’t know.” And it was confirmed.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got this.” He didn’t, though. The blank space was so clean, and the memories that had once occupied it were likely nowhere nearby. As a professional, Chromedome desperately wanted to talk to the person who had invented whatever had done this. Unfortunately, now was far from the time.

There was one trick Chromedome knew for recovering hidden memories, but for it to work in this situation, he would have to apply it to his whole processor. Where he knew there were other memories disconnected from their associations, memories he’d never planned to let resurface.

“Domey? Are you okay?”

Finding the memory that was supposed to be in the spot he was focusing on and manually repairing it could take days. But applying an algorithm that would reinstate all the memories that were floating around contextless to their proper places…that was achievable.

He couldn’t come out of this with no results. Rewind would forgive him, probably, but he would be disappointed. Chromedome didn’t want to know what the disappointment would do to him.

And maybe…maybe it was time. Maybe he owed it to the people he’d forgotten to do this. He was older now, wiser, stronger. They deserved better than the decisions he’d made when he was young and had taken an easy out from dealing with grief.

It took less than a minute. Chromedome pulled out as soon as it was done, not daring to spend the extra time it would take to examine the rebuilt connections. He could already feel his arm and processor overheating from the procedure.

He didn’t feel any different when he refocused on the world around him. Tired, sure, and his head was spinning a little like it had once only done after longer, more difficult procedures. But he was okay.

Rewind’s hands were encircling his wrists before he managed to summon the energy to retract the needles. “Are you okay?” he asked first. Then, “Did it work?”

Chromedome nodded and retracted the needles, experimentally wondering about the question he’d asked of Rewind. _Where did the matrixes come from?_

From Rung, of course. After he’d told them about… _oh wow_.

“It worked,” he said to Rewind. “But I’ve got a lot of work to do if I’m really going to make this right.” Luna 1 itself being a machine that could be used for remote mnemosurgery, Adaptus’s EM pulse being filtered through Rung at a low level of emission all his life, and then released as a second, Rung-focused blast when he’d sacrificed himself…it could be dealt with. Just not now.

Now, Chromedome pulled Rewind into his lap and felt Rewind’s arms encircle his neck as he pressed their forehelms together. “I know what happened,” he said. “And I think I know how to help you.”

He didn’t say that he wasn’t sure he was strong enough. That he wasn’t sure that he _could_. He would solve that problem. He had to.

-

Rewind was asleep, settled warm and comfortable against Chromedome’s side. Chromedome kept getting distracted by it – Rewind relaxed, Rewind looking like himself again.

Chromedome forced himself to get back to his research. The results had been disappointing so far – mnemosurgery had largely fallen out of favor, given its long history of unethical use and lukewarm efficacy for anything but. He’d assumed that after all this time, the medical community would have learned more about his condition. He’d hoped that they’d come up with some kind of treatment. But apparently, neither had happened. The scarce recent literature that Chromedome could find on the subject had a subtle undercurrent of _fuck them, they did it to themselves._

Ironically, if he had enough time and subjects to practice on, he could perfect the procedure that he would need to use in order to fix the broken connections between Rewind’s brain and his archive. And doing that practice would damage his own processor further, making it more likely that he wouldn’t survive the actual procedure.

He closed his datapad and tried to think. Adaptus had said that he’d built a machine on Luna 1 to perform mnemosurgery remotely. _On a global scale_. The _theory_ was sound. As long as the thing that the surgeon was trying to erase was specific enough, a pulse like that could erase the same memory from every brain. _How_ that pulse would be programmed was a complete mystery. Chromedome supposed he could do it, if he had some kind of template brain to work with. But he was far from an engineer, and he didn’t know who _could_ build such a thing.

He kept circling back to the example he’d given Rewind – Sunder, who was (fortunately, in every situation except this one) super dead. There was a chance Froid had kept records of his work with Sunder on the ship they’d brought to the Lost Light – a strong chance, given Froid’s proclivities for _publishing his every thought,_ as Rung had once described.

There was only one person Chromedome could think of who for-sure knew if Froid’s computer had survived the cannibalization of the Lost Light. He sent Prowl the message before he could talk himself out of it, and then he put his datapad away. Trying to do any more research at this point would just lead to his processor spinning in hopeless circles.

His motions disturbed Rewind, who had been curled against his side. “Sorry,” Chromedome whispered, as Rewind’s optics blinked on in wakefulness.

“You’re still up?” Rewind asked. It wasn’t the reason for Chromedome being up in the middle of the night that Rewind would have once assumed, and Chromedome was tired enough to be proud of that tiny step.

“Just trying to figure all this nonsense out,” Chromedome said, turning off the light he’d been using and settling back next to Rewind.

Rewind made a sleepy noise of understanding and snuggled closer. “I didn’t say thank you, earlier,” he said.

“You didn’t have to. You don’t have to.”

Rewind ignored that. “ _Thank you_. You believed me, and you trusted me, and I don’t even trust myself these days.”

“I’ll figure this out,” Chromedome said. “I might have a lead.” Just how unsavory of a lead it was, and who he’d gone ahead and involved in it, Rewind didn’t need to know just yet.

“Whatever happens,” Rewind said, voice soft and affectionate, “I love you.”

“I love you,” Chromedome replied, because it was true, and so Rewind would feel at ease enough to go back to sleep. He pretended he hadn’t heard the _whatever happens_.

 _I’ll figure this out_ had been a promise, and it was one he intended to keep.

-

He couldn’t sleep. Of course he couldn’t sleep.

The thing about memories was that most of the time they just existed. The impact that an experience had on emotional and decision-making centers was separate from the existence of the memory itself. So really, putting the memories of Pivot, Mach, and Scattergun back in their proper place didn’t change very much. He hadn’t remembered them. He did now. The end.

Except of course, he couldn’t stop dwelling. Scattergun of the Fourth Vorsk Offensive, who had been fascinated by Chromedome’s work and become apprentice to a medic because of it. And then died on a risky rescue mission shortly after.

There hadn’t been time to mourn. It was war. And Chromedome had had a way out.

Scattergun had died about a year before he’d met Rewind. If he hadn’t erased the memories, in all likelihood he wouldn’t have lived long enough to meet Rewind at all.

One day, maybe that fact would help him be okay with it.

-

There was a message from Prowl in his inbox the next morning. No greeting, no note, just a storage unit number in a government lockdown area and an access code.

Chromedome expected he’d pay for the information somehow later, but that was something he could be concerned about _later_.

“So that lead panned out,” Chromedome said when he and Rewind were both up the next morning. He would prefer not to tell Rewind that he was trying to get information from a long-dead serial killer and his keeper, but Rewind would probably react worse to information being withheld right now than he would to that fact. He explained about Froid’s computer.

“You’re trying to find a way to use mnemosurgery on me that’s safe for you,” Rewind deduced when Chromedome finished.

Chromedome nodded.

Rewind hugged him.

“I’m not complaining, but I kind of thought you’d resist me on this,” Chromedome said, even as he reveled in being able to stroke his hand down Rewind’s back. “You always hated the mnemosurgery.”

“I hated that it hurt you,” Rewind said. “You’re trying to figure out a way to do it so it won’t. You never would have done that, before.”

The shuttle to the government archive took about an hour, and getting through the security system around the Foreign and Dangerous Artifacts division took another two. Finally, a security guard was unlocking a door and pushing it open so that they could enter.

“Cameras are being monitored in these rooms in real-time,” the guard said. “Leave whenever you like.”

“Thanks,” Chromedome said to the odd shield over the guard’s face. The guard nodded in acknowledgement and left, leaving them alone in the room.

They’d kept Froid’s whole ship. It was an average-looking little shuttle that looked strange in the enclosed space.

Rewind hopped on board while Chromedome was still surveying the outside. “There are _books_ ,” Rewind called back after only a moment. That was good – Rewind could busy himself with analog reading about psychoanalysis while Chromedome dug into the unpleasant stuff.

The inside of the ship was unadorned chrome, the only thing resembling a decoration being the bookshelf that Rewind had pointed out. Rewind was in the process of dragging a table over to it so he could stand on it and get a closer look at the titles. Chromedome left him to it and stepped into the cabin, where he knew he could look through whatever notes Froid had left behind.

He scrolled through the files, trying to get a sense of the organizational system. There wasn’t a convenient folder called “Sunder” – everything as labeled by a project code or date. The dated ones turned out to be travel logs.

Chromedome started opening project folders at random. _Project Devil’s Eyes_ was, of course, the winner. Sunder was consistently referred to as _the subject_ , but it was obvious who Froid was talking about.

There was…quite a bit about Rung, oddly. Chromedome supposed that the forgettability that had defined Rung’s life hadn’t extended to people with whom his primary association was epistolary. Chromedome could tell that Froid had harbored a deep respect and a deeper dislike for his fellow psychoanalyst. And to think that all of this information had just sat here, forgotten, for all this time.

Chromedome tried to focus. Froid had managed to find a medical center, somewhere Chromedome had never heard of, that had performed a brain scan on Sunder. The results were in an image file that Chromedome clicked on instead of trying to piece together Froid’s conclusions.

Well, fuck.

There was no secret. There was no device that Sunder had used to allow himself to do mnemosurgery remotely. Instead, he’d let his craft eat away at his personality, his emotional processing and decision-making ability, his capacity for connection with others. Looking at his brain, it wasn’t surprising that he’d been the sort of person Chromedome had known him as.

But it wasn’t useful. Chromedome didn’t have the ability or desire to emulate what Sunder had done to himself. And on top of all that, Sunder had been edging himself toward death just like every other mnemosurgeon – maybe even faster, with how much more energy he was using to do it his unique way. This was a dead end.

“Fuck,” he muttered out loud, just in case it would magically make the scan show him something different.

The low-pitched syllable was enough to get Rewind to step into the cabin and peek over his shoulder. “What is it?” he asked of the brain scan, which must have been incomprehensible to a non-expert.

“This can’t help us,” Chromedome summarized. He didn’t bother to look through any more files, just powered down the computer.

“So we keep looking.” Rewind was clearly trying to be upbeat about the situation, but disappointment echoed in his voice all the same.

“Yeah,” Chromedome said. “We keep looking.” He tried not to sound like a person who had no concept of where to start.

For now, though, they had to get out of Froid’s creepy ship and back to civilization. “You ready to go?” he asked Rewind, who had walked in clutching one of Froid’s books.

Rewind nodded, not putting the book away. Well, it wasn’t like anyone had _explicitly_ told them that they couldn’t take anything. They both exited the ship and Rewind pushed open the door that would lead them into the hallway.

Then Rewind stopped dead. Chromedome had to lean around him to see what he was looking at and promptly rolled his eyes.

“I didn’t even know you were on this _planet_ ,” he said, easing his way around Rewind and shutting the door behind him. “What do you want?” 

Prowl glared at him with his single optic, unimpressed, as if he hadn’t expected to see Chromedome here despite having obviously, _obviously_ tracked him down. Chromedome was suddenly acutely aware that by asking Prowl for mnemosurgery-related help, he might have conveyed a message that he hadn’t meant to convey. And now he owed Prowl a favor. What had he been _thinking_?

“I can’t drop by to see an old friend?”

“You can, you just wouldn’t.”

In front of Chromedome, Rewind folded his arms.

“You must have known that I’d deduce what you wanted access to Froid’s ship for,” Prowl went on as if Chromedome hadn’t spoken. “You want to do more mnemosurgery.”

“Spit it out, Prowl,” Chromedome said. “What do you want?”

“To give you this.” Prowl held out a mechanical device that Chromedome had never seen the likes of before, a fragile-looking mess of exposed wires and circuit boards. “It’s from a former colleague’s laboratory. It’s the interface that allows machines like Aequitas to communicate with brain modules.”

Chromedome took it, turning the device over in his hands warily. This, unlike Sunder’s brain scan, was _exactly_ what he’d been hoping to get from this trip. But nothing came for free when Prowl was involved. “On what conditions?”

“No conditions. You need it. I don’t need it. And I _do_ consider you my friend.”

Chromedome looked up from the device – which he, not being an engineer, couldn’t discern anything from – and set his optics on Prowl. Prowl was looking keenly at Chromedome, and Chromedome suspected that if he turned this into a fight, Prowl would gladly rise to meet him. “Thank you,” he said instead. Prowl didn’t look surprised at his choice – his processor had probably calculated the odds of Chromedome accepting down to three decimal places.

“I have other business to attend to,” Prowl said. “It was good to see you, Chromedome. Rewind.” He managed a jerky nod in Rewind’s direction. Rewind cocked his head in bewilderment in response, but Prowl was already walking down the hall, in the opposite direction of the elevator they had ridden down on.

“Will that help?” Rewind asked, instead of commenting on the encounter.

“I don’t know,” Chromedome said. “But I know who can tell us.”

-

Brainstorm’s quarters these days were in a small nearby city that hosted the majority of New Cybertron’s engineering labs. The Lost Light Factory was nearby, still using their old ship’s engines to produce low-cost energy.

Brainstorm lived in the basement of a lab building, instead of in one of the worker housing buildings that most of the researchers stayed in. Nautica had helped him set it up, at one point, so it at least looked a little homey. There were separate lighting fixtures for the living and lab areas, and a decorative nonstop reaction chamber on a table in the living section cast dancing beams of green and blue light over everything.

“Good heavens,” Brainstorm said, as soon as he got the object that Prowl had given Chromedome under a scanner. “Who made this? Can I marry them?”

“I have no idea,” Chromedome said. “Can you figure out how it works?”

“Can I? Can _I?_ You dare insult my genius by asking if I _can_?”

“Well?”

“It’s not so much a matter of figuring it out, is it? You want to use it for something.” Brainstorm looked at the scan again, pushed a few buttons to change the specs that showed up on the screen, and then looked accusingly at Chromedome. He sounded tired as he asked, “What do you want to use the most incredibly specific EMP generator I’ve ever seen for?”

“I want to use it to reverse mnemosurgery,”

“You know you’re not supposed to –”

“I’m not _going_ to. I need to figure out how to program that thing to do it for me,” Chromedome said.

Brainstorm physically balked. “I may be a genius, but I’m not a neuroscientist,” he said, glaring accusingly at the device, as if this were its fault somehow.

“Which is why I figured it would be a collaborative effort.”

Brainstorm shrugged one shoulder, briefcase bobbing up and down. “Well, I haven’t had a lab partner in a long time, but heck. Why not start now?”

-

They figured it out. Chromedome tested it as much as he could, until he was absolutely sure that the device would only do exactly as he intended – reinstate Rewind’s memory of Rung, and make the disconnect between the contents of his archive and the contents of his processor, which Chromedome suspected – hoped, at this point – had been the real cause of his illness, obsolete.

“Are you ready?” Chromedome asked, squeezing Rewind’s shoulder over the back of the chair Rewind was perched on.

Rewind nodded. “I trust you.”

So Chromedome would have to trust himself. Trust his skills, and trust that he’d done this right. “I love you,” he said, and fired the pulse.

For a sparkstopping few seconds, nothing happened. Then Rewind blinked, and blinked again.

“You okay?” Chromedome asked, trying to keep his voice from trembling. He felt Brainstorm peering in over his shoulder, clearly also braced for the answer.

“I remember,” Rewind said, with a voice so reverent that he might as well be seeing God.

Well, in a way, he was.

Chromedome set the instrument carefully down and hurried to kneel in front of Rewind, who promptly surged forward into Chromedome’s arms. “Thank you,” he whispered.

“Did it work? Is it gone?” Chromedome asked. He braced himself for one of the terrifying flare-ups that Rewind had had on the rare occasion that he’d tried to make a database inquiry lately.

Rewind took a few seconds before answering, optics focused on nothing in particular, as they always were when he was concentrating on something internal. His squeal of joy was answer enough. “It worked!”

Tension that Chromedome hadn’t realized he’d been living with bled out of his body as Rewind moved forward to hug him again.

Now Rewind was sleeping, and probably would be for a while as his processor tried to recover from the stress it had been under for so long. Chromedome and Brainstorm were in the laboratory area, designing a carrying case for the device, which now had enough monitors and additions attached to it to make it fragile.

“You have to tell Nautica first,” Brainstorm said. Chromedome had repeated the procedure on Brainstorm as soon as he’d been sure that it had worked. “She loved him. She’ll be devastated, but she’s a smart one. She’ll help you with whatever you need to do to the thingamajig.”

“I had sort of hoped you might want to come with us,” Chromedome said.

“You know I can’t –”

“You _choose_ not to be able to leave. Think about what we just did – we figured out a way to make mnemosurgery obsolete, and it took a few _days_. You can make something better than a one-day travel pass briefcase,” Chromedome said. He’d known it for a while, but until Rewind had pushed him to start the journey they were on, he’d been content to leave it alone. But Brainstorm could do better than this life. And if it was on Chromedome to be the asshole to dare him to do it, so be it. “Call up Perceptor. Invent your way out of this.”

Brainstorm kept packing, and Chromedome thought for a moment that he was just going to pretend he hadn’t heard. “I’ll think about it,” he said. “If you call Nautica.”

Chromedome clapped him on the back as he locked the carrying case. “Of course I’ll call Nautica.”


	4. Chapter 4

Rewind had never been to Luna 1 before. He exited the transport sticking close to Chromedome, who had. But Chromedome looked so bewildered at the busy transport depot around them that Rewind decided it was safe to assume that their experiences with this version of the moon were about equivalent.

Rewind clicked on his camera to record the scene in the depot. He lingered on everyday commuters from New Cybertron making their way deftly toward the doors, travelers lingering to look at the transit map, tourists ogling the view of the hot spot out the huge window.

“Boo!” Anode’s grinning face was suddenly taking up the entire frame, and Rewind startled, taking a step back into Chromedome. Anode poked the side of his helm, swinging her other arm around Lug’s shoulders as she did. “Gotcha.”

“That video was for posterity, Anode,” Rewind said, crossing his arms and fighting a smile under his faceplate. For so long, everyone had been treating him as fragile, breakable. Even Chromedome. Anode’s cheerful, consistent abrasiveness was a welcome change.

“Oh, don’t worry about that. By the time we’re done with you, posterity’ll know the _real_ Luna 1 inside and out.”

“It’s really not as exciting as she wishes it was,” Lug said in a stage whisper that Anode could most certainly hear. Rewind zoomed his camera in on Anode’s fond pout before zooming back out to take in the rest of the view.

“Well, the underground show I had planned for us to see tonight may not be up to the Killtopia or Lost Light standards for adventure, but I was hoping that finding a _massive buried gun_ would be at least a little bit over the lip of ‘not boring.’”

“I’m sure it will be, love,” Lug said, linking her arm with Anode’s. “After we let our friends put their stuff down.”

Rewind kept filming as Anode and Lug led them to their house in the microcity that had popped up at the edge of the hot spot. Most of the sparks from this section had been harvested already, and the glow of the sparks still in stasis was like a far-off argon ocean. The Titan graveyard that Chromedome had talked about when they’d been preparing to make this trip was nowhere in sight. Instead there were shiny recently-built homes and businesses, none of the structures more than a few stories tall. Rewind kept catching glimpses of construction equipment and in-progress edifices on the town’s outskirts.

Anode and Lug lived in view of the hot spot, in a little chrome bungalow that opened up to an outdoor seating area decorated with shiny geodes. “Nautica will get here in a few hours,” Lug said as she pushed the door to the house open. “She’s parking here, though, not going through the depot.”

“Got her own shuttle for being a nerd all over the galaxy,” Anode said, rolling her eyes. “So, whatddaya want to do in the meantime? Tour of the spot? Drinks in town?”

“Actually, we should probably start with this,” Chromedome said, indicating the case he held.

“What are you going to do with it?” Lug asked, eyeing the case warily.

“Ideally, Nautica will help me hook it up to the moon gun,” Chromedome said. He put the case carefully down on a table and sprung the hinges to open it.

“Then what?”

“This.” Chromedome pressed a button on the keyboard that Brainstorm had attached to the device. It didn’t do anything visible, and Lug’s frown made Rewind wonder if it had worked at all.

“Remember Rung?” Rewind asked. He watched the confusion on Lug’s face shift into incredulous realization.

“What in high holy –” Anode’s exclamation shifted Rewind’s attention to her.

“Who’s Rung?” a cheerful voice asked from behind Rewind.

 _Oh no_.

Rewind and Chromedome hadn’t gotten much of a chance to discuss how to break the news to Nautica. Well, they’d certainly had time to discuss it, but they hadn’t done so. Rewind suspected that despite all their collective experience with memory and loss, neither of them had a clue how to approach the situation.

Rewind turned towards her, spark sinking. Whatever that unattained perfect solution may have been, it certainly wasn’t this.

“Surprise! I’m early. Don’t look…too excited to see me,” Nautica said, insecurity seeping into her voice and making the joke fall flat.

Silence filled the room like poison gas.

“Do it, Chromedome,” Rewind said as Nautica looked between them all, somewhere between crestfallen and confused. Chromedome silently obeyed, pushing the button again to send the EMP through the room.

“Let’s go outside,” Rewind said to Nautica, trying to cut in before she even had time to think to herself _who’s Rung?_ He grabbed her hand and pulled them both out the front door. Anode and Nautica had never gotten along, and Rewind doubted that she’d want such a large audience as she processed everything Rewind was about to explain to her.

Nautica had once trusted Rewind enough to come to him with a life-changing question. He hoped that he could repay that trust now.

“How could I forget?” Nautica asked, sinking to lean against the outside of Anode and Lug’s house, facing the hot spot. Her hands rose to cover her face, and Rewind took a risk and caught them in midair, waiting until she looked over at him before speaking.

“It isn’t your fault,” Rewind said. “There was nothing you could have done to prevent it.”

Nautica tugged her hands away and Rewind released them. She didn’t curl in on herself, though, just picked up a long, flat piece of obsidian from the bed of it beneath the geodes and started to turn it over in her hands. “Prevent what, exactly?” she asked, voice crackly with hurt. “Wait, never mind, I know this. Rung –” she hiccupped on the name, “He absorbed the pulse that Adaptus used to brainwash Cybertron. The energy from the blast emitted from him little by little his whole life – that’s why people kept forgetting his name. And when he died, the rest of the energy was released.” Still clutching the obsidian, she buried her face in her hands. “I could have tried,” she said. “I could have thought of something. _You_ did.”

“Not really,” Rewind said. “My archive contained information that I couldn’t process and it almost broke my brain. It took Chromedome and me both to figure it out.”

“He was my amica,” Nautica said into her hands. She shivered, as if it took saying the words aloud for the gravity of them to hit her. “I could have done something.”

“It was Chromedome and me who saw him last,” Rewind said. He hadn’t even really considered that fact, before now; his memories of Rung were back, but they’d gone mostly unexamined, competing with the relief of having his mind whole again. But it was Rung’s words that came to mind now, as he thought about what Nautica might need to hear.

Nautica looked up, blue optics anguished and overflowing, desperate for whatever Rewind had to say.

“I think…I can’t be sure, but I think he knew what was going to happen,” Rewind said. “Can I see that?” He motioned to the piece of obsidian that Nautica was holding, which was just large and smooth enough to be used as a makeshift screen. She handed it over, watching what he was doing intently.

Rewind pulled up the relevant recording and switched his camera to projector mode. Rung’s face appeared on the stone, and Rewind waited for Nautica to stifle a sob before he played Rung’s last words. _You need to learn to forgive yourselves._

-

“Are we even sure that the gun Adaptus was talking about is still on this moon?” Nautica asked the gathered group. She and Rewind were back in Anode and Lug’s house, clustered around a table with the two of them and Chromedome.

“I don’t see why it wouldn’t be,” Chromedome said. “Nobody remembers it, so no one would know to go after it.”

“Do you remember if anything in Tyrest’s base of operations mentioned it?” Rewind asked, looking towards Chromedome.

Chromedome rolled his eyes. “It’s kind of you to assume I paid attention to _any_ details on that little trip.”

 Rewind tried to parse that, confused for a moment before he realized that the Luna 1 debacle that Tailgate had described to him must have taken place after the second Rewind had died.

Rewind tried to move on from it without disturbing any more old wounds. “Maybe that’s a place to start, then? Tyrest was working out of some fortress, he had to have had some records of what was around him on the planet, right?”

“Possibly,” Chromedome said. “He had some kind of scanning technology, at least. His Legislators found us pretty much immediately after we landed on the planet. Oh, and they made it to the Lost Light.”

“Tyrest’s old haunt is heavily guarded.” The grin on Anode’s face was audible as she continued, “We’ll have to break in.”

“And I know the Legislators won’t be a problem,” Rewind said, trying to think of other possible issues. Tailgate had told him the story of _that_ part of the Luna 1 adventure enough times for him to be sure of it. “Where is this place?”

“Across the hot spot,” Anode said. She pulled out a datapad from under a lopsided pile of them on the desk behind her and opened it to show a map of one side of the moon. “We typically use the scooters to travel through the hot spot. Those are stored in a shed here…”

Rewind relaxed back in his seat and scanned the room with his camera. Anode was talking fast and eager as she described the heist, while Lug watched with naked adoration that probably would have turned into disapproval if Anode were to glance over to her. Nautica was nodding along, body language still withdrawn. And Chromedome was looking at Rewind, who met his gaze for a moment before turning back to the map.

They could do this.

-

“Found it!” Nautica’s triumphant exclamation, drawing Rewind’s attention to the computer she’d been bent over for the last several minutes.

“Keep your voice down! Found what?” Anode was already crossing the floor of Tyrest’s dark computer center.

“Tyrest has a satellite orbiting the planet, cloaked. Must be really well cloaked, to have kept New Cybertron’s astronomers from noticing it. Could even be from Adaptus’s time. I wonder if the specs are anywhere on this hard drive –”

“Can you see the gun?”

“I don’t even know if I can hack it yet.”

“You can hack it.” Anode stepped out of Nautica’s space and crossed her arms, watching intently as Nautica typed lines of code into the terminal.

Lug was at the door, keeping watch, leaving Chromedome and Rewind at a loose end. Chromedome had taken up a spot against a wall and was staring into the distance with his arms folded.

“You okay?” Rewind asked quietly. Chromedome had been driven and optimistic this whole time, and Rewind had kind of been expecting the bravado to crack at some point. Chromedome was so much better now – his moments of doubt were infrequent and had become easier to talk him down from, but Rewind knew that they would never go away entirely. He was just glad that Chromedome actually talked to him, these days, about what was bothering him.

“I’m okay,” Chromedome said, nothing in his voice to suggest that he was lying. “I just. I’ve never been back here. I haven’t had to think about that time in a long time.” He uncrossed his arms so he could clasp Rewind’s hand. “It’s so hard to think about that I’m surprised I survived it in the first place.”

“I’m just glad you did,” Rewind said, drawing their joined hands up so he could brush Chromedome’s fingers against his faceplate.

“I’m in!” Nautica’s triumphant exclamation was immediately met with a “Shhhh!” from Anode. Rewind looked over at the screen, which now showed what looked like a faraway photograph of the moon, with dense squiggly lines superimposed over it. “I don’t really know what to do with this, though. _Ugh_. Should’ve read more geophysics.”

“Let me look?” Lug’s voice was a context-appropriate whisper. Anode motioned her over to the computer and Chromedome stepped away from the wall to replace her as lookout. Rewind walked closer to the group at the monitor.

Lug typed a few commands into the computer and the image on the screen started to move, now accompanied by rapidly-changing numbers on the monitor next to it. “I haven’t used this software in a while, but a gun that can shoot all of Cybertron has _got_ to look like a major geological anomaly,” she explained. A few seconds after she was done, the program stopped running, a set of numbers – coordinates – highlighted on the monitor. The accompanying image of the planet looked just like the rest, except…

“Can it zoom in?” Rewind asked. Lug nodded and did as asked. Now Rewind was sure – there was a symbol written in what must have been huge text on the ground. Adaptus’s symbol, the mystery that had driven so much of the Lost Light’s quest.

“Oh my stars,” Nautica said, optics wide as she looked at it. She was smiling at the win – the first time Rewind had seen her smile since she had found out about Rung.

-

“Maybe there just isn’t a way to access it. Maybe he buried it forever.”

Rewind glared at Chromedome, but he couldn’t really be mad at his conjunx for voicing the thing all of them were thinking. They had tried everything, over the last few days. Anode and Lug had taken breaks to work their normal shifts and bring the rest of them energon, but otherwise it had been nonstop scanning of the area, testing of the ground near and within the symbol, and long winding conversations about Knights of Cybertron lore.

“No! There has to be a way.” Nautica’s voice was too heated to just be reacting to Chromedome’s suggestion.

“Let’s take a break,” Rewind suggested, mostly for Nautica’s benefit. “Pounding our heads against the problem like this won’t help. We should get some rest, do some research, maybe call in reinforcements.”

“Um,” Chromedome said, just as Rewind heard the sound of an engine in the near distance.

“Ha!” Brainstorm said after he’d landed and transformed. “Coincidence generator! I knew it had to have some latent effects.”

“Brainstorm!” Nautica had leapt to her feet at the sight of him, and she ran across the remainder of the distance between them to pull him into a crushing hug. She pulled back after a few seconds. “Are you okay? How did you get here?”

“I’m a genius,” Brainstorm said. His briefcase was still hooked to his wrist. “I called in an old friend, who had some suggestions for improving the Life Case.”

Rewind heard Chromedome smile from next to him, and knew immediately that this had, somehow, been Chromedome’s idea. Rewind squeezed his hand in acknowledgement.

“You’re trying to get inside of something that doesn’t want you in it, yes?” Brainstorm asked, telescoping out a scanner and pointing it toward the ground.

“I’m good at that bit,” Anode said. “What we’re trying to do is get inside of something that won’t tell us it exists.”

“The satellite insisted that there was something here,” Lug supplied.

“But all of our ground-based scans are saying that there’s nothing,” Nautica said. She hit her wrench against her wrist so that it set to vibrating, and pointed it at the ground. “See?”

Apparently the tone of the vibration meant something to Brainstorm, who nodded. “If the thing you want to get inside doesn’t exist, then you have to make it exist,” he said. “Hm. I assumed that this would be a blasting problem.” He glared at Chromedome as if it was his fault that it wasn’t. Rewind felt Chromedome shrug his shoulders innocently.

-

They figured it out.

It took all of them – Anode and Brainstorm to work out the complex pattern of places on the symbol that needed to be pressed to get Adaptus’s fortress to rise from the ground, Lug to snag some of her geology tools from work and teach the rest of them to dig it out when it got stuck due to millions of years of erosion, Nautica and Brainstorm to figure out how to shoot the Moon Gun, as Brainstorm insisted on officially dubbing it, and Chromedome to hook up the template brain to the Moon Gun’s systems.

Rewind watched. He watched, and recorded, and fetched and carried and supported and listened. This was all going to have to go into a film, ideally soon, to explain to the public why their memories of certain events might be confusing, and to demonstrate that with the Lost Light crew working on it, it was all going to be okay.

Rewind recorded as they fired the shot. He zoomed in on Nautica’s smile, and watched it fade as the triumph wore off and all of them started to think about what would come next.

They decided to hold the funeral on Luna 1, where Rung had once written _don’t forget me_ out of raw sparks. Holding the funeral there was half acknowledgement and half apology.

Rewind sent out invitations to the old crew and a notification to the New Cybertron news channels, and it didn’t occur to any of them until way too late that another Rung had died to save the entire population of this planet.

The total headcount was in the thousands. Minimus had to get involved in the organizing once the public got wind that it was happening. Rewind handled PR, logging the preparations and sending them out on public broadcast networks, and making arrangements to film the service for those who couldn’t make the trip to the moon. Nautica arranged the proceedings, with help from Chromedome.

 _Everyone_ showed up.

Rewind was ashamed to realize that he hadn’t seen most of the crew since the Lost Light had landed for the final time. The morning of the service was a blur of conversations, years upon years of catching up. Some people were doing great, and some weren’t. Everyone who had been at Ratchet’s funeral asked for the whole story of what had cured Rewind – except Tailgate, who had just hugged him and asked what he was going to do now.

“I don’t know yet,” Rewind said, because he really wasn’t _sure_. Right now, the breadth of possibilities was barely comprehensible after so long fighting just to stay conscious.

Minimus started the service with a song, an ancient one about the gods that Rewind had confirmed was known on both old and New Cybertron. “We are here today to recognize a person who sacrificed his life to save us all,” he said to the crowd. “And some of us are here to mourn a friend, crewmate, and confidante. To begin, Rung’s amica endura, Nautica of Caminus, will speak.”

Nautica looked sure of herself at the podium, none of the nervous shifting she would have once displayed at speaking to such a large crowd. Her hands gripped the sides of the podium but she held her head high, revealing the lamentorum gray of her badge as she addressed the crowd.

“I stand here today proud to have called Rung my friend,” she began. She spoke about his sacrifice for the sake of what they’d then called Functionist Cybertron, and gave the crowd an overview of the past several weeks and the story behind everyone’s recovery of their memories of him.

“I hope that today can be not only a day of mourning, but also a day of growth,” she went on. “If by remembering Rung, we each gain even a little bit of his bravery, or his kindness, or his selflessness, the world will be a much brighter place. It is in this way we are all connected.”

Rewind said the response ( _in this way, we are all connected)_ along with the crowd, even though he didn’t usually. He had never been religious enough to take the statement’s usual beginning seriously, but Nautica’s version felt true and honest, and Rewind very much wanted her to be right.

There were some speeches from New Cybertron officials, the announcement of a memorial for Rung to be placed in an Adaptica plaza, and a traditional mourning prayer, led by Drift. Rewind watched it all from his spot near the front, recording everything to make available to the public later.

People would watch it, Rewind knew, because they had created something amazing here. Rung would be remembered – finally.

The service was dismissed with one last song, an original composition for the funeral that Minimus insisted was from “an anonymous source”. Rewind scanned his camera over the gathered crowd as it played. Rodimus standing close to Drift, Tailgate leaning against Cyclonus, Nautica tucked against Velocity’s side and holding onto Brainstorm’s hand.

Rewind saved the video file as soon as the crowd started to disperse and shuttered his optics, leaning over to Chromedome for a hug.

“Love you,” he said into Chromedome’s shoulder. Despite the grief for Rung and for all the good things they’d had to leave behind, despite the intimidating rising tide of the future, it was the truest thing he could think to say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
